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Being young you have not known The fool's triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind.

William Butler Yeats

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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Fool
Dead
Sheaves
Known
Labourer
Lost
Labourers
Young
Bind
Best
Innocence
Love
Triumph
Life
Soon

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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A speckled cat and a tame hare Eat at my hearthstone And sleep there And both look up to me alone For learning and defence As I look up to Providence.
William Butler Yeats
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Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats
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I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.
William Butler Yeats
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For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
William Butler Yeats
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Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
William Butler Yeats
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The living can assist the imagination of the dead.
William Butler Yeats
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One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.
William Butler Yeats
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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
William Butler Yeats
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And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.
William Butler Yeats
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Let the new faces play what tricks they will In the old rooms night can outbalance day, Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they.
William Butler Yeats
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Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
William Butler Yeats
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O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
William Butler Yeats
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Speech after long silence it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom young We loved each other and were ignorant.
William Butler Yeats
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now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
William Butler Yeats
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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
William Butler Yeats
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I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
William Butler Yeats
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Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
William Butler Yeats
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If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats
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What can be explained is not poetry.
William Butler Yeats
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Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
William Butler Yeats